EVALUATION 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

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EVALUATION 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I first research music videos as a whole; before I made a final decision as to what song I would be making a video for.

I came across an episode of “The Gadget Show” where they had to make a music video (using modern technology) and had to find out what kind of music video would be best for their song/ genre. From this program I learn about 2 main types of music video; performance based and narrative based.

I looked at 2 music video’s; smells like teen spirit, by Nirvana, this was a performance based video, set in a school, where we saw a bit of narrative, just to emphasise the mood of the song, but overall was a very performance heavy video, whereas the other video I looked into was “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, and this video is a narrative/ dance routine video. This supports Andrew Goodwin’s music video analysis, where the video will “portray the genre characteristics”.

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics
(e.g. stage performance in metal video, dance routine for boy/girl band).

 This is a screen shot, early on from my music video; this shot is one of the transition shots between live performance and narrative. Where the guitarist is playing a telecaster, and playing quite high on is person, like the Arctic Monkey’s (a professional Indie-Rock band), who also play in a similar style, with similar style guitars, and also feature a narrative behind their music videos as well.

This is taken from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, from the dance section of the video. Like a lot of 80’s pop music a lot of the theme for their music video’s was dance based with quite cutting on the beat shots, heavily featuring a sometimes rather complicated dance routines. And occasionally, like in this example, 80’s pop/ dance music have a narrative behind the song, to give it more of a big production/ film like feel.

This shot comes from early on in Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”. Being a Grunge song, there is a use of darker “grungy” yellows, and a sense of a darker atmosphere. This music video tends to be a performance based video, to an audience of teenagers, so it links the performance as part of the narrative.

2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals
(illustrative, amplifying, or contradicting).

 In “Thriller” there are lots of references between the lyrics and what we see, from Obvious suck as this sign of a cinema titled “Thriller”, this is more illustrative and amplifying, to examples that are more subtle but simple, like hand jesters:

to emphasise words suck as “something evil’s lurking in the dark” and of course the video is set out side at night.

In my music video, I’ve used some ‘cliché’ ideas, very obvious actions to go with lyrics, the action in this screen shot fits with “I sit and I wonder.”

And I have also layered different shots together, and by doing this, it has given me a holographic/ ‘ghost’ like effect.

3. There is a relationship between music and visuals
(either: illustrative, amplifying, and contradicting).

 This is taken from an action shot, where Ed (the singer) moves according accents in the music, this carries on an energy through the song, with similar movements, this wasn’t planned, I wanted the performers to create the feel in their song them selves.

I also used the music to determine where I would cut the shots, especially, towards the end of the song, where the music is full of energy, and what I believe to have more of an agree/ serious feel, Just like in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as the ending becomes more intense as does the movements, and the speed in which the shots cut between one-another.

4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style).

In Michael Jackson video’s he is often shown wearing tight cloths, or more famously – “sparkly” clothing and his one white glove. But in ‘Thriller’ he still wears tight clothing, more to suit this particular song. But he is always shown his unique style of dancing.

Nirvana are often shown with their guitars lower on their body like other grunge/ alternative-rock bands, and Kurt Cobain was often shown to have long straightened/ messy hair.

Doing some research into indie bands such as Arctic Monkeys/ The Smiths, who also wear their guitars higher up on their body like other bands, and a wardrobe of skinny or tight jeans and plain t-shirts, generally a lot free-er in choice of clothing, unlike other genres which would try and look uniform, like The Beatles.

5. There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc.) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

Music video’s often use a lot of exploitations of the female body in a sexual way to make them appear to be venerable. For example:

Lady Gaga often shows her self in a voyeuristic way, this heavily supports male gaze theory where buy, even if the music isn’t aimed at a male target audience, the video’s would appeal to males due to this way this media uses the female body to almost attract a wider audience.

 Kylie Manogue; this particular example is taken from her “Get Outta My Way”, although she also uses the same kind of exploitation with the male body as well. This can arguably be challenging Male Gaze theory and the format of the media as a whole, where her music video’s can seem more acceptable to more people if both males and females are treated in the same way.

I also wanted to challenge the way women are exploited in the media, and other music videos. Although the female in my video is never shown a significant amount but I didn’t want the main focus of the video to be about ‘the girl’ more about the significance of her to the song.

  

There isn’t a lot of “screens with in screens” in my video, where we see the female character, but when we do, it’s a form of a memory. So although we may not physically view her in a voyeuristic way, for we know the male character could be, especially whilst watching one of these “memories” on a computer screen.

6. There is often intertextual reference (to films, TV programmes, other music videos etc.).

In my music video there isn’t any other real reference to any other media type, other than the video camera footage shown on the computer screen. I believe this is more to the fact that I didn’t think that other media products would make much of an impact on my music video, or contribute any real significance to the style or genre. However in a lot of music video’s of different genres, there is references to other media texts, some more obvious than others, usually depending on the song/ genre. A couple of simple examples of this would be: a radio in ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’.

The cinema in ‘Thriller’

Digi pack on magazine cover:

For my digi pack I did a lot of researching into mainly Indie-rock band album covers. This is mainly due to the fact that I did want to stray too far with using styles of other genres. This is because I have found that different genres like ambient or Indie-rock, or all genres in fact, have more or less their own styles of album covers, no matter what the band, a particular genre will usually have a similar style to their album cover.

I found a great website for this http://sleevage.com, this site specialises in album art work, and allowed me to search via music genre/artist and I managed to conclude that Indie-rock album covers are generally very artistic, some nature based, some symbolising/representing or portraying something be it to do with a song/ lyric / name of band/ or even a piece of art to represent an emotion that would best describe the songs on the album or the band.

To find the background picture on each side of my digi pack, I wanted to find a picture that I would then change and manipulate for myself, to create almost my own artwork to portray the emotion of the song.

I first simply searched an emotion that is clear to me in this song. I searched for “anger” expecting to get reds yellows and orange colours as almost stereotypical colours that one would expect.

And coming across the images I did, I then experimented with colours and gradients and fonts and effects, and I wanted to include a theme of “Holograms” as a literate visual, contrasting to the metaphoric message of the song, example of this would be where you can just about make out the members of the band as if they were projected (badly) on to the cover, whilst blurring the title “Holograms” into the background for an extra added effect, leaving COLONY in clear black writing.

Finally with my magazine cover, I wanted it to be based on ready existing magazine covers, which featured bands of a similar genre, because I believe it is a simple yet effective way to advertise a band/act/ to get a message across and I didn’t want to change too much of something that is already effective.

I took inspiration from Clash magazine [http://www.clashmusic.com/magazine], NME [http://www.nme.com/magazine], and Kerrang [http://www.kerrang.com/blog/newissue/], three well selling and popular music magazines, I looked at the format, and how they all used space to include text without obstructing the main picture, which was usually the main featured band in the magazine. Important bands were in large letters, without much information added; it’s just a way of advertising the band/ the article without giving too much information away. So naturally I included this idea into my magazine cover.

The picture of the main band is normally in front of a plain background, not to draw attention away from the artist, and a lot of the time the artist is shown in front of the title of the magazine, to give the artists prominence over the magazine, making people more interested in the artists to buy the magazine.

Of course even though I had my aspects and design of a magazine on paper, I was only limited to what I knew about Photoshop, so it was worth me taking my time to experiment with feature of Photoshop Elements 8 that I had access to at home, and after a while I found some useful effects that I could use to incorporate into my magazine, such as “photo montages” but using it to blend colours and pictures. So I could create interesting and still keep to my Indie genre characteristic.

Digi pack front cover

After some feedback from the digi pack, and It was mostly well received. However the front cover was commented on being to much of an "Ambient" music genre, and some suggestions were put forward about having the band members in the distance in the picture to give a "holographic" effect.

By doing this the colour and positioning of the words didn't fit anymore, so i played with colours first, finding that black worked fine with the band name, and I just moved them around and found this layout worked fine, and feedback from other people seem to back this up.

Auxillary Task Digi-Pack Cover

As I previously researched I decided to make my digi pack cover a more art based/ related. So I searched on the Internet using words that would describe some of the moods of this song such as anger and depression and found some picture that i found i was able to change and manipulate to create a cover more suited to an indie rock band.

 This is the front cover, the original picture is allot bigger and had a larger variation of colours, I also cropped a section of the picture i wanted, sharped the image and added the band name "Colony" and title of the single "Holograms". I tried to blur the word Holograms with the background to try and add the effect of the suggested word.
Older designs of this front cover varied from different sections of the originally picture and different colour filters and different fonts etc.
one version included a longer white "spiral" which had comments from my teacher and people around me, on being too "falic" so obviously adjustments had to be made to be more appropriate to be able to appeal to my audience.

This picture came up when searching for Anger and i thought i could use this as the back of my digi-pack cover by using the shapes to add the titles of tracks.

This is the end product of the rear of my digi-pack as you can see I have rotated, colour filtered cropped, enlarged and sharpened the image. As-well-as adding the titles of the tracks, the primary track "Holograms" is the larger of the 3, I have included 2 other songs also written by the band.
To give the Digi-pack / Single more of a realistic look, I have included a bar code, a Logo of a record label which to my research signs up primarily new, more, indie rock genre bands. Finally I have added the normal copyright rules underneath as all CD/ Album covers do etc.

This is the inside of the Digi-pack part way through editing. this i found when searching the word "Acceptance" and this image originally showed an "outer-space" themed picture including stars and a larger variety of shades of blue. I had to select an interesting part of the picture and get rid of ever unwanted detail individually, it was a long tedious process but it had to be done. I Also but a blue filter on the image that gives it a more washy look that doesn't draw to much attention as its only a background. I'm using this image as it can be used as a panorama effect one the whole inside of the digi-pack.

Here is the finished inside of the digi-pack. I have added a picture of Ed the writer of the song and lead singer of the band Colony, I had to cut him out of the previous background and had to repair some the picture as it was lost during extracting him from the previous image. I have also had to blend him to match the background so that it was an obvious image but still didn't stray too far from the theme. I also added the Lyrics of the title song "Holograms" using a lighter blue, so that it would be legible from the black and dark blue and not be too over-powering.

My friends and teachers have given me their feedback and opinions through out my process of creating this, from simple movements to complete color changes. I believe this was important because its other people at my age group that would have to like my digi-pack as that's what my target audience is mainly based at, so their opinion to a product aimed at them is critical.

My chosen song

I've chosen to do a song from a band at this School named "Collony" and I've chosen one of their latest songs called "Holograms" this song is about the loss of a loved one and coping with that loss.

Holograms by COLONY

This is the song  I will put a video too.

(In order for me to be bale to put this song on this blog I had to use http://www.youconvertit.com to concert the song to the right format to be able to upload the song onto http://soundcloud.com so i cold get the embed code to copy onto this blog.)

Auxiliary task - Album cover research

For the band ‘Colony’ and their song, I would like to do a single cover with the idea of art more than focus of the band, and running with the theme ‘Holograms’ I would use this last album cover as inspiration as by using the layering technique gives an almost hologram For one of the Auxiliary tasks I have to do an album cover/ digipack So I've done research into specific genre album covers (Indie-Rock) which would help me more, seeming that the band I'm dealing with is an Indie-Rock band. I'm researching, to see if their album covers are particularly different in anyway, and what theme design would be best for COLONY and their song "Holograms".

Albums cover research: Album covers that I have found relating to other Indie-Rock bands seem to have a theme that could represent the title of the album or just art work that would be used to stand out and be “iconic” such as: R.E.M’s album Murmur inspired by some lyrics that are hard to make out; “They called the clip a two-headed cow / Your hate clipped and distant, your luck, pilgrimage,”

 

And Death Cab For Cutie’s album Transatlanticism was described as

“More ‘art’ than ‘design’” and “Iconic”.

It was designed to stand out and be immediately recognised by other people. 

This Album cover is more abstract and unclear, and more art based, it shows a number of industrial buildings digitally layered on top of each other to produce a piece of art that is clearly eye catching and iconic. 

For the band ‘Colony’ and their song, I would like to do a single cover with the idea of art more than focus of the band, and running with the theme ‘Holograms’ I would use this last album cover as inspiration as by using the layering technique gives an almost hologram effect.

For this research i used a sight called http://sleevage.com, this sight allowed me to read up on the artists that made the album covers and how they were made and their inspirations which helps me to understand what I kind of need to do o create my own album cover in the Indie-rock style that is most appropriate. this is the link that I used specifically to do my research: http://sleevage.com/category/genre/indie-rock/

Pete’s Advanced Portfolio – Ideas

Track: Holograms by Colony

Genre: Indie-Rock

Themes of track: The song ‘Holograms’, by the “well known” band, ‘COLONY’ is a song referring to the concept of loss and missing someone. The song contrasts the loss of two separate people, one of which I (Ed – songwriter) care about, the other I (he) do(es) not.

This is shown in the song where the first half is melancholic and soft, the other is heavy and brash.

This is info from the songwriter himself describing what the song means to him and what the song is about.